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Monthly Archives: January 2014

How do you make your skill set, job history, volunteering, hobbies and education work for you when job hunting? You just need to know how to make your skill set applicable to the career that you are aiming for. Many positions have similar needs; such as, good customer relationship building, time management, and problem solving. These skills may be attained in a variety of settings, from serving/waitressing, supervising, project management, nanny positions, study groups, teaching, etc. Thusly, they can be applied to many different jobs as a valuable skill.

To start, look at the job that you are seeking and identify three important abilities that will be needed to perform the job functions. Then look over your skills and describe how and where you got them and how they will be beneficial in the job and environment that you are applying for. Always use a customized cover letter and resume, proving your points on how you will be a perfect fit for the job. By customizing your skills you increase the relevancy of them and your fit for the job while decreasing the importance of areas you may not be as strong in, such as education or work history.

With an extremely low unemployment rate, hiring can be a battle! To circumvent the possibility of making poor hiring choices based only on passing filters through met qualifications, it is important to look for quality employees, and not to lose a possible perfect organizational fit due to an outdated hiring filter.

With Nebraska unemployment rates extremely low, employers can make a tough situation worse by applying unnecessary hiring screens to their processes. These filters could be based on degrees, work backgrounds and disqualifiers such as credit scores or criminal backgrounds.

With certain jobs, degrees are absolutely necessary, ie: nurses, doctors, layers, etc. However, just because you have previously hired individuals with bachelor degrees, that should not preclude you from giving thought to looking at individuals with associate degrees, or perhaps no degree, but with related experience.

Nontraditional work backgrounds can offer a transferable skill set. Success comes from ability and experience, not strictly one or the other. With drive and passion, employees can exceed expectations; adversely, with lack of these, an employee can fall short of hopes.

Some disqualifiers are mandated by federal law, such as care workers being unable to have a criminal history. However, some are company policy and could be outdated or irrelevant. To screen out potential hires based on a criminal history, credit score or reference, could be a misstep. Many applicants are working toward bettering their lives and are looking for a chance to prove themselves.

In the end, removing hiring filters may increase the length of the hiring process, due to more resumes and more choices. However, if you find the best possible fit, it could reduce your turnover and increase your employee satisfaction.

Since we are now in cold and flu season, it is important to remember the basics on staying healthy and preventing the spread of germs. A few basic tips to keep from missing work and to help your co-workers stay healthy:

Wash your hands frequently. If you can’t wash frequently, then keep antibacterial hand sanitizer with you. Keeping clean hands will help prevent you from catching a cold or virus and will also help prevent germs from spreading if you fall ill.

Eat healthy. By increasing your fruit and vegetable intake you will help boost your immune system with the extra vitamin C.

Stay active. By exercising and getting up to move around it will help keep your blood flowing and strengthen your immune system.

If you fall ill, make sure you cough or sneeze into your elbow or upper arm to prevent the spread of germs to others.

These basic health steps can help you and your co-workers stay healthy and miss less work through the winter season!

Current job seekers should know that in this frenzied, digital era, they are exposed on all of their social media pages. Whether your social site of choice is Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or another, anything you post online is conceivably going to be seen by hiring managers or HR directors at the companies you are applying to work for.

This is generally seen as a negative for most people. However, this is a wonderful opportunity to show some of your attributes that you cannot portray on paper. Use these spaces to highlight your volunteer career, your diligent work ethic, some of the work you have done in the past, some of your local business connections and anything else positive that could relate to your field of work.

Once you have updated all of your social media pages by ensuring that they are emphasizing your strengths, and after you have removed any unfavorable images, go ahead and put your page links on your resume. This will give yourself an advantage by taking something others are shying away from and highlighting your own strengths with it.